Cross-eyed Chrysler

On the way in to work today I noticed this cross-eyed Chrysler minivan:

Notice how the light on the left is almost the same as the light on the right. Except that it's upside down. And actually subtly different -- two white bars on the left instead of three, a square-ish mirror on the red light on the left instead of the round one on the the right. This is especially strange considering that someone just bought this car! It's almost like the dealer bought the wrong light and figured they'd just install it anyway.

But, it gets crazier! Look what happens when they step on the brakes!

Both top lights turn on, even though the left one is really the white "reverse" light! They clearly hooked up the left light assuming it was the same as the right one, even though it is upside-down. I can almost hear the people in the repair shop, "There! I fixed it!" I just hope the people who recently bought this car got a good price...

Bleached book

Apparently, we left this copy of Go Dog Go partially exposed to sunlight.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what book was masking it.

2 days of "fame" for UUIDs and GUIDs

So last week I "launched" the CAUSE Community for the Care of All UUIDs and I was really satisfied with the public reaction. Lots of tweets were tweeted, overwhelmingly positive, with lots of people joining the cause. Unfortunately there were a few "monsters" who took the opportunity to actively destroy large numbers of UUIDs automatically.

I didn't see anyone mention two little easter eggs that were baked into the site so I'll talk about them here:

This inspiring image by Philipp Rümmele is actually titled Peeing from the highest mountain of Lower Austria ... and now that you know it is impossible to unsee...

Typically pages will have a 404 error if you go to malformed URL, like this one for example... on the CAUSE Community we of course named the error with its own UUID.

The site had a full 2 days of fame, 4 days of mild interest, and we are now preparing for an eternity of obscurity. This is a graph of the first 7 days since the launch.
Thanks for thinking of the UUIDs!

Challah for morons

I came across this bizarre invention at my local judaica store:

Now, I suppose there might be someone out there who 1) wants to bake their own challah, 2) has no idea how to braid challah, and 3) who has also never heard of Google. But, seriously? "Fill & Bake, No Braiding Required"?!? It does say "Easy instructions included," but I figure the kind of person who'd need this device would probably freak out at the concept of instructions. "Instructions?!?" I can hear them say, "if I wanted to follow instructions I would have learned to braid challah!"

Although, it actually made me think: What, un-braidable thing would be fun to shape with this and serve like challah? Maybe it could be used as a Jello mold? Any other ideas? Let's hear them in the comments.

The CAUSE Community for UUIDs

About a month ago I mentioned a Facebook page I was experimenting using Facebook Ads to get likes on. I finally launched that site behind the page this afternoon.

The idea is that since UUIDs are unique, each one is special and we should treat them more carefully than other types of data. The website url is of course a UUID itself:
http://d315f714-26fh-4346-96a8-11a864cdfcb5.com/

Photo:  Handful of Fall, by life_is_good_pete

So far there have been about 4K hits, which is pretty tiny by internet standards, but I think its not bad considering that the url is not something you would never remember or try to type. It has generated a bit of discussion, and I've sadly learned about a kind of antithesis site which does exactly what you would expect: http://wasteaguid.info/

The facebook page, amazingly continues to gather likes without promotion and it now has close to 1K likes. It turns out that all those bots who have liked the page are actually supporting a cause for their kin...